4. The Use of Residential History in Environmental Health Studies

Residential histories – listings of the places and dates where people have lived over their lives – are useful for assessing lifetime proximity to environmental hazards. When past residences are ignored, as is the norm, results are biased against finding an association between exposure and disease. I conducted a comprehensive review of 26 published environmental epidemiological studies using residential histories to assess current practice. Most often, studies collect all of a person’s exact lifetime addresses resided in for at least 1 year, and exclude missing data – reasonable, though not necessarily optimal, choices. Residential histories are complex and time-consuming to collect, and must be researcher-initiated, as they are not an element of any population-based disease surveillance systems in the United States. Indeed, surveillance systems often have difficulty collecting even basic demographic items. As such, residential histories are best suited for focused research studies involving direct contact with subjects through interviews or questionnaires.